genderbutt: The thing that bothers me the most about SAO, game design-wise, is that players can see...

genderbutt:

The thing that bothers me the most about SAO, game design-wise, is that players can see other players’ menu screens at all times.

Players can even move each others’ fingers so as to force a sleeping player to accept a duel request in order to PK them.

What the fuck. What the actual fuck.

And yet the game apparently doesn’t have a level display that’s publicly visible, even though names, health bars, and PKer status are visible.

Talk about bass-ackwards game design.

Also, are all those comatose players’ families still paying subscriptions so that their loved ones don’t get unplugged? If not, where is the game company getting the money to keep the servers running? Has the government picked up the tab in order to save the players’ lives? What if their wi-fi goes down, would that trip the failsafe, frying their brains (and if it doesn’t, why doesn’t someone just unplug the router)? Have they all been moved into a hospital? They can’t have been, right? So they’re all getting in-home care (IVs, catheters, etc.)? That’s pretty expensive, so it’s lucky that Japan has public health care. A lot of this would be solved if we assumed that in-game time passes faster than real-world time, but the captions imply that that’s not the case.

It seems that overall designers of the MMO games in the series are working out the kinks of how games are designed in VR.  As such there are a ton of issues that exist that are not present in a normal online game such as being able to see players menus, sleep PK etc, things that a normal game would be patched after they were discovered but because everyone is locked out of system except kayaba just aren’t.

After the incident the original company does go bankrupt, the government is covering the cost of moving the players and keeping them alive.  There was a special government taskforce assigned to handle the whole incident.  Kayaba actually explains that the players are in hospitals at the beginning of the game, the anime just doesn’t include it for whatever reason.  But the authorities had a two hour time period to move them

If the wi-fi went down for more than ten minutes, the nerve-gear would kill the player.  Good for them they live in a future with almost countrywide wi-fi.